Publicus Blog

February 21, 2017

Content Blues During Website Redevelopment?4 min read

A few tips on simplifying content migration

By Caroline Casals

Website redevelopment projects can be stressful. The combination of many decisions, moving parts, changing content, stakeholders, and deadlines can lend themselves to a certain degree of redesign madness.

In my position as a quality assurance tech and content migration lead, I get to see these struggles up close and personal. Do any of these experiences sound familiar?

The mad dash to copy and paste content into the content management system (CMS) before launch

It can be crushingly difficult to understand all the content until after site launch when it’s finally in one place again.

Sanity, restored

What’s needed is a viable way to manage these content blues. You can certainly try to “homebrew” a solution, but there’s at least one great tool out there designed to make the redevelopment and migration process easier. The one we use is called GatherContent. GatherContent is a flexible, simple-to-use, all-in-one content production application.

Here’s how it helped with a recent project:

1. Editing

The in-line commenting, notes, and revision log are familiar tools that simplify the editing process. Moving away from Word documents can be a tough sell for stakeholders (we’ve been there before). GatherContent offers enough of the tried and true to set folks at ease.

GatherContent’s text editor allows authors to manage content all in one place. Along with common text editing tools, content gets clean, web-friendly formatting. Authors and editors can plan and craft pages long before entering content to the CMS. We’ve found it quick to learn with a minimum of training.

Furthermore, the easily updatable templates provide complete control over page structures. Content is organized in accordance with the final page layout. Templates that mirror CMS content types help editors feel at home on the new site.

2. Workflow

We’ve found the highly customizable workflow helps to manage the critical approval steps with ease. The color-coded at-a-glance reporting points out bottlenecks before they’re a crisis. Notifications can remind users of due dates and required approvals. Customizable roles and permissions ensure that the right people have the right tools. Reviewers, authors, and editors can get access to the pages they need — and avoid those they don’t.

We’ve also found that the process helps people feel comfortable moving into the new CMS. For example, after learning the GatherContent toolset, Drupal workbench content moderation is much easier to adopt.

3. CMS Integration

The ability to integrate with the CMS infrastructure sets GatherContent apart from lesser tools. API integrations allow content to be migrated directly from the GatherContent templates into the new CMS. This means less copy-paste. (Tip: To ensure a smooth mapping process, don’t forget to watch your field types!)